Climate Change is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks
—Wallace Broecker
A lot is changing. A whole lot, and just like Nma, my mother, would say, I can feel it in my body. I can also feel these changes. Nonetheless, I think the changes have gone beyond feelings. I see and hear them everywhere and every passing day. At night, usually before dawn, the wind sings in that voice that resembles an ancient masquerade. It is very scary. Some years back, it used to be like a soothing whistle or flute, something susurrant, until the trees around danced in harmonious bliss to the alluring tune of the wind, spraying out their leaves to the ground when the show ended. Now the wind rattles our windows and doors, sweeps in different calibres of polythene bags and other assorted wastes into our compound, and keeps us half awake at night praying that it doesn’t pull off our roof.
I can also see it coming. In 2015, when I went to stay in far away Gusau, a town located in northern Nigeria along the Sahelian savannah region of the country with my aunt and her family, I couldn’t help but notice how different their environment was from where I was residing, how flat their landscape was, which stretched and stretched one’s eyes until all one could see was the Earth running into the light blue and wooly white sky. How devoid of trees those landscapes were—a scenario which I later learnt in school to be caused by aridity plus desert encroachment.
Gusau was usually hot, especially during the day, even during rainy season. Standing under the sun for too long would result in a nefarious headache to end your day. There were days you wouldn’t even dare walk under it. It felt as though you could stretch out your hands, jump up a little and touch the sun. The surest survival kits for such days were chilled water to quench the burning thirst in your throat and enough of the lukewarm water for bathing each time you felt stuffy and itchy. And coupled with all that, there was serious water scarcity. Morning meant piling up buckets and jerry cans in search of water either from open wells or pipe-borne taps. Long was the queue, fierce was the struggle, impure was the water that we could only use to bathe or wash clothes, especially water from the wells.
I fear the aridity is encroaching into our Guinea savannah region. I fear that the rash and hostile weather condition of Gusau has trailed me back to Nasarawa state where I live with my family. Every day, I pray that the heat and scarcity of water is just a slight change in weather—nothing more, nothing less.
I began to notice these changes in my community at the beginning of the year when I returned home from a one-year stay in Lafia, another town kilometers away from where I reside with my family. I live in a rural community that is fast becoming urbanized, but without the necessary social amenities. Houses are cramped into each other and we rarely have electricity to cushion the effect of heat on us. Probably because my community is densely populated, with almost everyone racing against time to make ends meet, most people are too bothered by the economic unfriendliness of the country, to focus their attentions on the changes. But I noticed them within two weeks of my arrival.
Everywhere was dry, and the air was whitened with mist and dry cold in the morning and brown with dust in the evening. I knew these were the prominent features of harmattan, but I felt it was unlike the others that had preceded it. At the turn of February, the cold, misty morning left and was replaced by windy morning, stormy evening and hotter afternoons. And I began to long for the rainy season to arrive.
My mother used to say that it is the romance between the sky and the Earth that birth rain: each time the Earth blows the sky a kiss, she becomes too overwhelmed and shed down tears of joy. What happens to the romance during dry season, especially moments when there was no power and the room was very hot? I would ask. She would point out places that were still having rainfalls in the country. She also added that in her childhood days, they experienced longer rainy periods, and rivers hardly carted away valuables like a heartless thief. A lot of questions kept bothering me: does this indicate we would be experiencing shorter but destructive rains in the future? or dryer and intensely hot heat periods?
In answer to my questions, we experienced irregularities in rainfall—months that were known for intense rainfalls recorded not more than 10 rains, excluding rainshowers when it drizzles for hours non-stop, which was unlike it. To make matters worse, other neighbouring places and towns down the River Niger were having more rainfall than our town. Nma usually would quip, “See, the rain didn’t fall again. There is too much killings in Nigeria for God to send us rain.”
“But it rained in towns and villages closeby,” I would reply. “Besides, we are not the ones engaging in the killings for God to deny us rain.” I know she was aware of the changes in climatic conditions, but since she was raised in a Christian home, her only justification for it was tied down to religion: God’s wrath on man for turning their backs on him, just like Sodom and Gomorrah, just like in the times of Noah. She knows nothing about global warming as the cause of the ever-changing climate. She knows nothing about the imminent effects climate change will have on us, especially countries located below the sub-Saharan Africa. She knows nothing about how millions of Africans were encouraging desert encroachment by cutting down trees for diverse reasons. So I joined her to pray and longed for the rain so that we would have water in our wells and our crops would grow robustly.
During my undergraduate year in the University where I was pursuing a degree in Environmental Management, we were taught that trees contribute immensely to rainfall and its distribution across each region, reasons why the rainforest zone of Nigeria, with so many trees, experiences more rainfall than the savanna and arid regions of the country.
My residence posseses few of these natural components of the environment: few intermittent rivers and fewer scanty trees. In fact, the fewer trees that had survived deforestation in the past, especially big trees that took up space, were going down for new-erected buildings. Fruit trees were countable because of how they become prey to stubborn boys when they start fruiting. This has resulted in fewer trees and hotter afternoons with nowhere to cool off, so you are forced to remain in your hot room, enduring the heat if there is no electricity.
To cap it all, the most ugliest experience is water scarcity. Shortage of water has become a threat to society. Wells are drying up, and it felt like our well was the first to empty its waters. We began to source for water in other open wells around. The first two weeks, we fetched in the afternoon or morning, until the interest of other water searchers began to materialize on the open wells. There were days we would go to the wells to find them dry, dirty and almost empty.
We re-strategized and started fetching the water at dawn before everyone else woke up. But that didn’t help, because the water seemed to be dwindling in quantity by the day, with or without competition from others.
One hot afternoon in the middle of April, I came out to find water to cool off because the weather was considerably hot and saw some children moving to and fro like ants with pails of water of different sizes on their heads. I traced them to their source only to realize it was a pure water bottling company—Truine Bakery and Pure Water Company—that was giving out free water to people. I joined the queue immediately.
Children were stopped from playing and asked to join in fetching the water. Every drop was precious. Everything that had the capacity to hold water was to be filled. Every trip counted, and so the more the heads carrying buckets of water, the sooner the house gets filled with it. One woman even remarked that weren’t the children the ones who consumed water the more? I didn’t agree to that, but I said nothing, listening to the conversations and the women asking their children the same questions: Are all the drums in the house filled up? What of the ones outside?
Soon, it got to my turn, and I took the water home, informing everyone about the turn of events. We too soon came out with our buckets and anything that needed to be filled with water.
And that became our own water cycle system—women fetching water in the morning while children roamed around in the evening looking for water. During school vacation, the children were saddled with the duties of sourcing water no matter the distance.
At the beginning of 2023, I got a teaching job at a private secondary school close to where I reside. I find it really tasking, nurturing the future leaders of the country, but what I found more tasking was getting up very early for work after spending most parts of the nights fanning myself with an old magazine to assuage the heat and the body itching that follows to the barest minimum. At school, the other teachers and I usually inspect the children and accord severe punishment to the defaulters—those that are improperly dressed. It reduces the level of nonchalance and wayward dressing amongst the students. We do this every morning.
One fateful Monday morning towards the end of February, I was inspecting the children for improper dressing. A junior student was without her neck tie. I asked her, why didn’t you knot your tie? and she began to play with her fingers, whispering. I lowered myself to her face level, bringing my ears to her mouth. “My mother asked me not to because of my heat rashes.”
“Is that so?” I knew most of the students had series of pranks up their sleeves, so I called another student—a female—to check to see if it was true or not. They both returned, with the other student confirming the heat rashes. The intense heat of March and April was already rearing its ugly head during the cold harmattan season of February.
The changes are becoming more pronounced. The coldness hangs in the air in the morning, reluctant to leave. The scorching sun sizzles and claims dominance of the afternoon, keeping everyone indoors. Most evenings find mothers crooning for the children to leave the prevalent sandstorms when they are not searching for water. It is taking a toll on everyone.
Maybe one of these days, I will bring it up in my classes. They may have noticed the slight difference in the weather, and it would be a lot of help to them knowing measures that could help them in our climate changing world. It is not too late to teach them about tree planting and nurturing more trees. We all are stakeholders of the environment and it is our responsibility to preserve it. The future is ours to take, and unless we get it right now, the narrative will remain the same, even as the climatic condition continues to change.
